Last week, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft launched successfully from the Kennedy Space Center. It’s now on a six-year trip to an asteroid, also called Psyche, located in the solar system’s main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Unlike previously studied asteroids, it’s not composed mostly of rock or ice. The Psyche spacecraft's target is largely made of metal, thought to be around 60% iron and nickel. The mission won’t actually land on the asteroid—all of its observations will happen from orbit,...
Oct 25, 2023•18 min•Ep. 632
Research shows some rapidly evolving trout are altering Wyoming's aquatic ecosystems. Plus, paleontologists pieced together a level of apex predators with no modern equivalent. In Wyoming’s Mountain Lakes, Stocked Trout Are Evolving Quickly Anglers across the West love to fish in high, alpine lakes, and Wyoming’s Wind River Range is nearly unbeatable for this experience. Around this time of year, frost covers the tips of trees at sunrise, and there’s plenty of room along the lonesome blue waters...
Oct 24, 2023•18 min•Ep. 631
In her new memoir, astrobiologist Dr. Aomawa Shields describes how a quest for life in the cosmos helped her find meaning on Earth. One of the biggest, most intriguing questions in the world is quite simple: Are we alone in this universe? Astronomer and astrobiologist Dr. Aomawa Shields looks for signs of life in outer space by analyzing the climate and habitability of small exoplanets far beyond our solar system. Dr. Shields’ path to science was a winding one. Through childhood and into her adu...
Oct 23, 2023•18 min•Ep. 630
Seven “clean energy hubs” will receive a total of $7B to develop forms of hydrogen production with minimal carbon emissions. And, ahead of the US Grand Prix, an aerodynamicist breaks down the recent engineering changes to F1 cars. Department Of Energy Announces ‘Clean Hydrogen Hub’ Awardees The Department of Energy announced seven “clean hydrogen hubs,” which will receive a cumulative $7 billion. Each group will use a host of different approaches to produce hydrogen fuel with little or no emissi...
Oct 20, 2023•24 min•Ep. 630
In a conversation from 2019, Ira and the researchers behind a “catcam” study discuss the secret lives of your feline friends. If you want the real scoop on what your cat is doing while you’re away, researchers are studying that very question, using cat cameras. Our feline friends spend quite a lot of time outside of our line of sight, and we imagine them napping, bathing, playing, hunting. But that’s merely speculation. To get the data, researchers need to catch them in the act. Maren Huck, Seni...
Oct 19, 2023•17 min•Ep. 628
If you were asked to name the early astronauts, you probably wouldn’t have much trouble; Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, John Glenn come to mind easily enough. But what if you had to name women astronauts, besides Sally Ride? It’s a question that even space nerds might have trouble answering. A new book from space reporter Loren Grush centers those women’s stories. The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts goes deep into the histories, triumphs, and tragedies of Sally Ride, Judy...
Oct 18, 2023•24 min•Ep. 629
When math is based on abstract concepts, how do we know it’s correct? Dr. Eugenia Cheng takes on that question in a new book. The concept of math has been around for a long time, developing independently in many different cultures. In 1650 BC, the Egyptians were creating math textbooks on papyrus, with multiplication and division tables. Geometry, like the Pythagorean theorem, was used in ancient Greece. And negative numbers were invented in China around 200 BC. Some mathematical concepts are ea...
Oct 17, 2023•33 min•Ep. 627
You’ve probably heard that there’s an updated COVID-19 vaccine on the market, and maybe you’ve already gotten your updated booster. But there are new kinds of vaccines in development that go beyond just tweaking protection to better cover circulating variants. In one promising development, researchers adapted the decades-old MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine into one covering measles, mumps, and multiple variants of SARS-CoV-2—and, rather than a shot, they delivered that experimental vac...
Oct 16, 2023•13 min•Ep. 628
A new analysis of ancient footprints in New Mexico adds to the debate about when humans arrived in North America. Plus, astronomer Dean Regas offers tips for safe viewing of Saturday’s eclipse. New Data Support Human Arrival In North America 22,000 Years Ago In 2021, scientists uncovered ancient human footprints in White Sands, New Mexico. Dating of the footprints suggested that people arrived in North America thousands of years earlier than anthropologists had thought. It sparked fierce debate ...
Oct 13, 2023•18 min•Ep. 626
A Saltwater Wedge Is Moving Up The Mississippi River As the Mississippi River drops to one of its lowest levels in recent history, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said salt water from the Gulf of Mexico could threaten drinking water as far north as New Orleans’ French Quarter if no action is taken. On Friday, the Corps announced plans to avoid that scenario by building upon an existing underwater barrier that has been in place to block the progression of salt water from intruding farther uprive...
Oct 12, 2023•19 min•Ep. 623
How Artists And Scientists Collaborated To Make Art About HIV This past July, the 12th International Conference on HIV Science was held in Brisbane, Australia. But this wasn’t your typical scientific conference. Yes, findings were presented on the latest in HIV research, but it culminated in a museum exhibition. 12 HIV-positive artists were paired with 12 scientists, and each pair collaborated on a piece of art, largely based on the scientists’ research. One of the pieces attracted a bit more at...
Oct 11, 2023•18 min•Ep. 625
The latest trend in celebrity health care is full-body MRI scans , with influencers like Kim Kardashian endorsing them. These scans aren’t covered by health insurance, and run over $2,000 out of pocket. Typically, a new diagnostic tool is marketed to doctors and radiologists. But companies like Prenuvo are now marketing directly to consumers. They claim that their scans will catch early signs of cancer, aneurysms, liver diseases and even multiple sclerosis. It’s an appealing promise. If you can ...
Oct 10, 2023•19 min•Ep. 622
A news story was circulating a few months ago—a woman in Australia came into the hospital with abdominal pain. She was increasingly forgetful and struggling with depression. Her doctors were stumped for over a year. What was causing her symptoms? Turns out she had a three-inch parasitic worm living in her brain. They took it out, and she recovered. How do doctors crack cases like this? How do you even know to check for a brain worm? This is the specialty of Dr. Joe DeRisi. When doctors run into ...
Oct 09, 2023•18 min•Ep. 623
An mRNA Advance Wins A Nobel Prize This week, a handful of scientists scattered around the world got surprise telephone calls announcing that they will be receiving Nobel Prizes. On Monday, the prize in medicine or physiology was announced. It went to Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, scientists who developed the modifications to mRNA that made the biomolecule a viable strategy for creating vaccines. On Tuesday, the Nobel in physics went to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier, who...
Oct 06, 2023•25 min•Ep. 624
The Science Behind The Placebo Effect Earlier this month, a Food and Drug Administration panel concluded that a common decongestant ingredient used in drugs like Sudafed and NyQuil doesn’t work . The panel agreed that while the ingredient, called phenylephrine, isn’t dangerous, it doesn’t work any better than a placebo. That made us wonder: How well do placebos work? And why do they work even when people know they’re getting a placebo? Ted J. Kaptchuk, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical Sc...
Sep 29, 2023•48 min•Ep. 621
After 7 Years, NASA Gets Its Asteroid Sample About a week ago, space nerds got the delivery of a lifetime: a sample from Bennu, an asteroid soaring through the galaxy, currently about 200 million miles away. The capsule of rocks and dust came courtesy of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid. Scientists hope it’ll help unveil some of the mysteries of our universe, like how the sun and planets came to exist or how life began. Guest host and musician Dessa ...
Sep 29, 2023•48 min•Ep. 620
Florida’s Reefs Are Vanishing. Can Scientists Save Them? This was a bad year for Florida’s coral reefs. Since the 1970s, reef cover in the Florida Keys has decreased by 90%. Those remaining reefs have been subjected to water temperatures higher than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, alongside other threats like disease and ocean acidification. This is a big problem for the largest reef in the continental U.S., which plays an important role in protecting the shorelines from erosion and storms. Scientists a...
Sep 22, 2023•47 min•Ep. 619
A Week Of Climate Protests, Meetings, Pledges, And Action Climate Week NYC is wrapping up, where hundreds of events took place across the city (including one from Science Friday), all with the goal of encouraging conversation and action around our climate crisis. The weeklong event takes place alongside the UN General Assembly meeting, where world leaders discussed climate change, alongside other topics, including the war in Ukraine and universal health coverage. While President Biden emphasized...
Sep 22, 2023•47 min•Ep. 618
New COVID Boosters Arrive Amid Rise In Infections This past week, the FDA and CDC recommended new COVID vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna for anyone over the age of six months. They’re expected to be in larger pharmacies by the end of the week. It’s welcome news for some, as cases have ticked up over the summer, accompanied by higher hospital admissions and deaths. The boosters join a suite of other vaccines to combat respiratory illness this fall, including this year’s flu shot and the new RSV v...
Sep 15, 2023•48 min•Ep. 617
Astronomers Find Exoplanet That May Be Covered In Water Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope made an exciting discovery this week: Exoplanet K2-18 b , 120 light years away from our solar system, could be covered by a water ocean, similar to Earth. Astronomers say this could be a big leap in our exploration of life on other planets. This news comes amid another JWST discovery: The earliest black holes seem to be much larger than black holes today. This news also provides evidence that ...
Sep 15, 2023•47 min•Ep. 616
Where Soil Grows Above The Trees You might be used to the feeling of Earth under your feet, but did you know that there’s soil high above your head? Way up in the treetops, where ferns, mosses, flowers, and even trees grow on top of the forest. A new study in Geoderma describes the factors that contribute to how canopy soil is formed. Ira talks with lead author Jessica Murray, an ecologist and PhD candidate at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. They discuss the importance of canopy soil, what...
Sep 08, 2023•47 min•Ep. 615
Scientists Develop Human Embryo Model Without Sperm Or Eggs This week, research published in the journal Nature detailed a model of a 14-day old human embryo created without using sperm or eggs. The hope is to shine a light into a previously unavailable window of an embryo’s development, potentially helping to better understand miscarriages and side effects of medications taken during pregnancy. Ira talks with Casey Crownhart, climate and energy reporter at MIT Technology Review to talk about th...
Sep 08, 2023•47 min•Ep. 614
What’s That Smell? An AI Nose Knows If you want to predict the color of something, you can talk about wavelengths of light. Light with a wavelength of around 460 nanometers is going to look blue. If you want to predict what something sounds like, frequencies can be a guide—a frequency of around 261 Hertz should sound like the musical note middle C. Predicting smells is more difficult. While we know that many sulfur-containing molecules tend to fall somewhere in the ‘rotten egg’ or ‘skunky’ categ...
Sep 01, 2023•48 min•Ep. 613
What To Expect From Hurricane Season We’re approaching the peak of hurricane season, which is usually around mid-September. It’s that time of year when it feels like there’s a new storm every week, and we blow through the alphabet trying to name them. This week, Hurricane Idalia made landfall around Florida’s Big Bend as a Category 3 storm, which caused a few fatalities, left hundreds of thousands of people without power, and some without homes. So what do we know about Idalia, and what can we e...
Sep 01, 2023•47 min•Ep. 612
How Early Humans May Have Transformed L.A.’s Landscape Forever Join us on a time traveling adventure, as we go back 15,000 years to visit what’s now southern California. During the last Ice Age, saber-toothed cats, wooly mammoths, and dire wolves prowled the landscape, until … they didn’t. The end of the Ice Age coincided with the end of these species. And for decades, scientists have been trying to figure out a big question: Why did these animals go extinct? A new study in the journal Science o...
Aug 25, 2023•47 min•Ep. 611
Countries Seek To Return To The Moon On Wednesday, the Indian space agency ISRO celebrated as its Chandrayaan-3 craft successfully made a soft landing at the lunar south pole. This is the first mission to explore the region around the moon’s southern pole, and a major success for ISRO. The mission plans to use a robotic rover to conduct a series of experiments over the course of about 2 weeks, largely centered around the availability of water and oxygen-containing materials. Less than a week ear...
Aug 25, 2023•47 min•Ep. 610
Challenging The Gender Gap In Sports Science This weekend, Spain and England face off in the Women’s World Cup Finals in Sydney, Australia. The first Women’s World Cup was in 1991, and the games were only 80 minutes, compared to the 90-minute games played by men. Part of the rationale was that women just weren’t tough enough to play a full 90 minutes of soccer. This idea of women as the “weaker sex” is everywhere in early scientific studies of athletic performance. Sports science was mainly conc...
Aug 18, 2023•47 min•Ep. 609
Youth Climate Activists Score A Win In Montana This week, a state court in Montana ruled in favor of a group of 16 youth climate activists , who argued that a state environmental law was in violation of a provision in the state constitution. The Montana constitution states: “The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.” The ruling will allow (but not require) regulators to consider climate impacts when evalu...
Aug 18, 2023•47 min•Ep. 608
We have a new podcast! It’s called Universe Of Art , and it’s all about artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or wherever you get your podcasts . Devastating Fires Might Become More Common In Hawaii As of Friday morning, at least 55 were dead and thousands were seeking shelter on Maui, after wildfires tore across the Hawaiian island. Officials there say that the fires, once rare , have caused billions of dollars in damage, and th...
Aug 11, 2023•45 min•Ep. 607
We have a new podcast! It’s called Universe Of Art , and it’s all about artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or wherever you get your podcasts . In ‘The Pod Generation,’ Pregnancy Goes High-Tech In the new movie The Pod Generation, a wife named Rachel, played by Emilia Clarke, and her husband Alvy, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, want to start a family. In the movie’s near future, you don’t have to have a baby by getting pregnant, o...
Aug 11, 2023•47 min•Ep. 606
